Arghh! We have a brand new month of development progress to show! This month marks an important milestone for Blackwake, as our two largest remaining features have finally been implemented. What does this mean? After alpha 3 tests should start becoming more frequent as they'll mostly contain new content , fixes, optimizations, and balances rather than new large and invasive features.

We'll do things a bit differently this month and kick it off with a quick video overview of what's new.

General changes since alpha 2

Most of our time was spent working on melee/customization and early alpha 4 content, but there have been some changes to the base TDM mode and in general for alpha 3.

You can now invert mouse Y in options

Buckets should be much more effective

Grapples cannot be released if they were used to enter overtime

During grappling, leaving your ship to go on land or swim will count as abandoning ship. You will not be counted as a defender and the attacking team does not have to kill you to win. Going on the enemy ship to attack does not count as abandoning.

More performance optimizations/general fixes

Tickets are back for TDM, but grappling will now freeze their amount

Customization

After adding an animator we're glad to say customization is in and seems to be working great! We're very excited to see players customize their characters and plan to have more options in the future such as gender and weight. The selection is limited right now, more customization content will be added with each alpha test.

Melee

​Melee has been completely overhauled and a brand new system now replaces our old temporary melee system. In the new system, you can swing in 3 directions and also block in 3 directions. You can trigger attacks or blocks by a left or right mouse drag in the direction you wish, respectively. With this update ping is now a more important factor in combat, so we will try to have EU servers for alpha 3.

Land

We've trashed all of our old land assets and have written a new set of terrain/foliage shaders. Along with this has come an early look at our destructible land forts. Land forts will be used to protect capture points in future game modes, as they can attack approaching ships. Forts won't be in alpha 3, but they will be our main focus for alpha 4.

Leveling and captain rating

All that score now adds to your level and will unlock more outfits and hats, weapons may be included in leveling but it hasn't been decided yet. Note that if we do decide to put weapons behind a level barrier they will be quick unlocks.

Leveling has been sped up for the alpha weekends, such that you should be able to unlock all gear by the end of the weekend.

Captain rating has also been added so the crew can make quicker decisions about who should be captain. If you are elected captain at the beginning of the match you will have 15% deducted from your rating. The only way to get it back is to remain as captain and win, which will grant you 30%. Note that if you are elected mid match at random the deduction does not apply to you, and you will still receive 30% for winning.

Everyone on a winning team will receive +5% captain rating to credit as experience for being under the command of a competent captain. Since captain rating caps at 100% and is an ever changing stat, it does not lock out new players who would like to try being captain.

Music and sound design

We've began revamping every sound in Blackwake, dropping a few of our placeholders we've used for years now. This will be an on going process as we hope to overhaul everything we currently have.

Garrett has also done a few new tracks:

Next month

Our current rough time for alpha 3 is mid July, and we will once again be holding a pretest slightly before the alpha weekend to check for anything critical. This may seem redundant but it stops us from scrambling to hotfix critical gamebreaking bugs we may have missed testing only as us two.

Alpha 4 is planned have a new gamemode among other fixes and improvements. From there we will continue adding the content planned for the base release of Blackwake.